Space tech boom offers militaries the "ultimate high ground"
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
A ballooning number of spying technologies inside and outside Earth's atmosphere are making military maneuvers and materiel nearly impossible to hide.
Why it matters: Concealment and surprise have long been winning tenets of warfare. But these ever-watching eyes complicate the calculus of what gear to buy, how to move and where to dig in.
- Overhead imagery exposed Russia's buildup on its border with Ukraine, for example, and later aided the identification of electronic eavesdropping stations in Cuba.
Driving the news: New photos from Maxar's first pair of WorldView Legion satellites, launched in May, catalog on-the-ground details, such as the amount of people in a given area, open cargo holds on a ship and the height of buildings.
- The resolution is known as 30-centimeter, meaning each pixel is equal to a square foot in the real world. That metric is considered an industry gold standard.
- At least four more satellites are slated to come online by the end of the year. Legion is already months behind schedule, though.
My thought bubble: More systems means more invaluable monitoring of hot spots, including the Korean peninsula, greater Middle East, South China Sea and Eastern Europe.
Dan Smoot, Maxar Intelligence's chief executive, in an interview said the company is pursuing real-time insights, meaning as little lag as possible between satellite assignment, image capture, data relay and expert analysis.
- When Legion is fully up and running, the company will be able to collect more than 6 million square kilometers of imagery daily.
- The cluster will also feed Maxar's 3D models of the world. The company works on One World Terrain, an Army program that compiles realistic and precise digital maps, as well as environments for the F-35 Full Mission Simulator.
State of play: This voracity for faraway insights is not exclusively felt stateside, and myriad companies are jockeying to fulfill orders.
- The National Reconnaissance Office in 2022 awarded BlackSky, Maxar and Planet satellite imagery contracts totaling billions of dollars.
- Capella Space in July secured a nearly $15 million deal with the Air Force. Chief executive Frank Backes told me: "More than ever before, the intelligence community and [Department of Defense] are looking to rapidly capitalize on the novel capabilities that new space companies" bring to market.
- Countries that lack space expertise and infrastructure, such as launch facilities and rockets, are turning to the commercial sector to fill the gap, according to Jason Mallare, a vice president at Umbra.
- "Pennies on the dollar, we can go lease a fraction of a satellite, get imagery we need, the products we need, the services we need from space, whatever," he said.
Between the lines: What has made this possible is an increasing tempo of launches paired with decreasing costs.
- "The real pivot point," Mallare said, "was launch going from $100 million a ride to $1 million a ride."
Bottom line: Space is the "ultimate high ground," HawkEye 360's vice president of marketing, Adam Bennett, said. The company, which hunts and maps electronic signals, launched six new satellites this year.
- "National governments are hungry for any space-based information that can help them anticipate problems and protect their sovereignty."
